idaxex is a native loader plugin for IDA Pro 9.3, adding support for loading Xbox 360 XEX and Xbox XBE executables.

Originally started as an IDAPython loader, work was continued as a native DLL to solve the shortcomings of it.

This should have the same features as xorloser's great Xex Loader (for IDA 6 and older), along with additional support for some early non-XEX2 formats, such as XEX1 used on beta-kits.

XBE files are additionally supported, adding a few extra features over the loader included with IDA.

Supported formats

Includes support for the following Xbox executables:

• XEX2 (>= kernel 1861)
• XEX1 (>= 1838)
• XEX% (>= 1746)
• XEX- (>= 1640)
• XEX? (>= 1529)
• XEX0 (>= 1332)
• XBE (>= XboxOG ~3729)

Features

• Can handle compressed/uncompressed images, and encrypted/decrypted (with support for retail, devkit & pre-release encryption keys)
• Reads in imports & exports into the appropriate IDA import/export views.
• Automatically names imports that are well-known, such as imports from the kernel & XAM, just like xorloser's loader would.
• PE sections are created & marked with the appropriate permissions as given by the PE headers.
• AES-NI support to help improve load times of larger XEXs.
• Marks functions from .pdata exception directory & allows IDA's eh_parse plugin to read exception information.
• Passes codeview information over to IDA, allowing it to prompt for & load PDBs without warnings/errors.
• Patched bytes can be written back to input file via IDA Apply patches to input option (works for all XBEs, XEX must be both uncompressed & decrypted using xextool -eu -cu input.xex first)
• XBE: adds kernel imports to IDA imports view
• XBE: tries naming SDK library functions using XbSymbolDatabase & data from XTLID section

Install

Prebuilt releases are available for supported IDA Pro 9.x versions.

Copy the loader files into the matching IDA installation's loader/plugin directory, or follow the build steps below and install the resulting binary into your IDA SDK output folder.

For PPC Altivec analysis, the PPCAltivec plugin remains a useful companion: https://github.com/hayleyxyz/PPC-Altivec-IDA

Building

Make sure to clone repo recursively for excrypt submodule to get pulled in.

Windows

• Point IDASDK environment variable at your IDA SDK 9.3 root.
• Run CMake to generate the VS solution: cmake -B build -G "Visual Studio 18 2026"
• Build with cmake --build build or use the idaxex.slnx file.
• idaxex.dll will be built at $IDASDK\src\bin\loaders\idaxex.dll

Linux

• Use the IDA SDK 9.3 CMake bootstrap from src/cmake/bootstrap.cmake if your SDK tree has it, or the standalone ida-cmake bootstrap if you keep that package separately.
• Make sure IDASDK points at the SDK root.
• Run cmake -S . -B build from the repo root.
• Run cmake --build build.
• To build xex1tool, run cmake -S xex1tool -B xex1tool/build and cmake --build xex1tool/build.

On newer IDA SDKs, libida.so may be the correct library name in place of libida64.so.

Credits

Based on work by the Xenia project, XEX2.bt by Anthony, xextool 0.1 by xor37h, Xex Loader & x360_imports.idc by xorloser, xkelib, XeCLI, and probably many others I forgot to name.

Thanks to everyone involved in the Xbox 360 modding/reverse-engineering community!

XTLID parsing supported thanks to the XboxDev/xtlid project.

xex1tool

Also included is an attempt at recreating xorloser's XexTool, for working with older pre-XEX2 executables.
(The name is only to differentiate it from the original XexTool - it'll still support XEX2 files fine)

So far it can print info about the various XEX headers via -l, and extract the basefile (PE/XUIZ) from inside the XEX.

For XEX files that are both decrypted & decompressed xex1tool can also convert a VA address to a file offset for you, making file patching a little easier.